snow on snow on snow
by slipstream
Summary: A freak snowstorm leaves the farmhouse cut off from the rest of the world. With the food supply dwindling, no power, and the turtles succumbing one by one to the cold, it's up to Casey Jones to save Christmas and April O'Neil to save everything else.
1. Chapter 1

That first horrible week in the farmhouse, Leonardo needs his bath water changed three times a day. It's a disgusting and excruciatingly painful process, judging by the muffled sounds leaking through the bathroom door. The turtles refuse to let either Casey or April help, despite April's arguments that it's technically _her_ tub getting stained with blood and god knows what else.

"I'm sorry, April," Mikey says, his face grey and gaunt behind the stark green of his freckles. He's carrying a dripping armload of bloody bandages, cradling the bundle close to his plastron like a precious doll. Behind him, Donatello's shushes aren't enough to drown out Leo's broken gurgles. "Brother stuff, you know?"

April is an only child. She shakes her head.

"I just want to _help_ ," she says. "I just want..."

Her father is gone. _New York_ is gone. Casey's father, his sister. Master Splinter. Irma...

...was never really there to begin with, was she?

And whose fault was that she'd... That _they_ ' _d_...

April's cold hands curl into hard fists.

"I'm going to see what else I can find around the house that we can use as supplies," she says. "Donnie still needs more cut-up sheets, right?"

"Yeah," Mikey laughs, smile wide but brittle at the corners. He clutches the soiled bandages a little closer. "Leo's about bled through all of the first batch."

Her boots thump heavily across the floorboards, leaving small clouds of dust in her wake. Each room of the old farmhouse feels somehow colder and emptier than the last. April huddles further into her coat, nose wrinkling at the stale odor of sweat. She hasn't taken it off for more than a few minutes at a time since she first put it on what seems like a lifetime ago, standing in the front hallway of her apartment and rolling her eyes good naturedly as her dad lectured her on the dangers of stiff breezes and chill night air, both of them doing their best to pretend that chapped lips and a head cold were the worst things waiting for her out in the dark city streets.

Sometime during the drive up from New York, she'd put her hand in her pocket only to find that her trusted tube of Carmex was missing. She's quit trying to return Michelangelo's hollow grins with a reassuring smile. It makes her mouth bleed.

April aches for a hot shower, for the thick lather of shampoo against her scalp, but that will have to wait until Casey manages to fix the hot water heater. All of the water they can manage to boil on the stovetop's few working gas burners has to be saved for sterilizing needles and cotton and stabilizing the temperature of Leo's bath.

Raphael—who's spent most of the last few days huddled over the stove, eyes darting and alarmingly neon in the half-gloom—only lets them use the least-efficient of the burners to heat their own meager canned meals. Water for tea and stale instant coffee they boil in a kettle over the living room fire. With the lights flickering and popping threateningly each time they flip more than two switches, none of them have dared to see if the old 1980s microwave still works, let alone the furnace or any of the other appliances. At least it's cold enough for Mikey's mutated cat to wander around outside without the worry of melting.

"I'll take a look at the wiring," Donnie promises each time they manage to drag him out of the first floor bathroom. He refuses to sleep on the nest of mattresses they've made in front of the fireplace, but he takes the coffee and dry toast they force into his hands with minimal protest. "And the furnace. Just as soon as Leo's stable."

Alone in what used to be her grandmother's closet, surrounded by moth-eaten cardigans and polyester blouses gone stiff with age, April shudders, tries not to think about the flat, distant look to Donnie's eyes whenever he talks about Leo, the way they lock onto cobwebbed corners and empty points in space rather than meet her own.

* * *

When April was small, summers at the farmhouse meant sunburnt afternoons learning to swim in the river, or riding into town with Gran in her peeling champagne Oldsmobile, the trunk and most of the back seat overflowing with squash and zucchini for the farmer's market. Her parents would take her to the music festival where they met, Mom trading in her subdued, carefully ironed office wear for loose blouses and bright, flowing skirts that swirled like water around her tanned legs as she and Kirby swung April giggling between them, all of them with flowers in their hair.

April stayed in her mother's childhood bedroom, under the watchful if faded gazes of a large Joni Mitchell poster and half a dozen cross-stitched songbirds. At night, if April couldn't sleep, she would creep through long, creaking hallways, the shadows making looming gargoyles out of the taxidermy ducks frozen in flight along the walls of the stairway, until she reached the living room. Dad could never figure out how she got so good at the Atari, but Gran had caught her more than once. Some nights she would shoo her straight back to bed, but most nights she would wrap her in the musty afghan that lived on the back of the couch and lead her further into the night, the two of them rocking lazily on the yard swing as Gran pointed out constellations and twinkling satellites she kept insisting were spaceships until April finally fell asleep.

Pop Pop had been more reserved—aloof and quietly doddering in what April realizes now must have been the end of a long, slow slip into senility—but he'd go walking with her through the fields, nodding solemnly whenever she burst out of the grass to show him a frog or interestingly shaped rock. They spent long, hazy hours out in the barn, Pop Pop under the hood of his black pickup, April up in the barn loft carving mazes out of the musty lumps of hay. He'd died halfway through April's first year of school, and the week that they'd spent there for the funeral was the only time April had ever seen the farmhouse in winter before she helped carry a half-dead Leo through the front door.

She remembers this house as a place of exploring, of quiet adventures and closets full of mothballed mysteries and wonder hidden in old shoe boxes and ancient cookie tins. Now she evaluates each piece of the rustic decor of her grandfather's den with a battle-hardened eye. She should feel something, she thinks, when she looks at the dusty wooden snowshoes mounted on the wall above his rusted silver rifle and finds herself measuring out how many inches worth of stitches Donnie could make with the string, but after days of listening to Leo moan and slosh restlessly the thought only plucks tunelessly in her chest.

Too thick, she ultimately decides. But if they use up all of the thread from Gran's sewing kit, then maybe it could be unwound into individual strands. She takes an armload of old phone books and farmer's almanacs down with her to the living room for kindling.

They've pretty well decimated what usable sheets there are to be found. The lace-trimmed tablecloths folded up in the dining room credenza crumble yellow and useless beneath her touch, but the faded floral dust ruffles that trim the twin beds upstairs prove hardier.

She finds an overlooked first aid kit at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, most of the creams and pill bottles decades out of date. The half-full bottle of rubbing alcohol still seems okay, though, so she sets it aside for Donnie. The rest of the cabinets hold nothing but mismatched drinking glasses, the pots Raph had deemed too small or dented for effective boiling, and the sorry assortment of non-perishable goods mixed with gas station junk food that make up the bulk of their meager food stock.

April had had forty seven dollars, a metro card, and an "emergencies only" prepaid debit card with a $100 limit in her wallet when they left the city. Casey had had even less—twelve dollars plus or minus some change—and after some quick, huddled whispering the turtles had scrounged another hundred and twenty in filthy, carefully smoothed out bills between them. The debit card is already half gone, spent on the fuel they needed to get the six of them to North Hampton in the first place, and the paper money feels too-light in her hand, a futile stopgap against the heart-pounding math of six bodies in need of food and medicine and toilet paper ( _Jesus_ , how do they manage to go through so much _toilet paper_?) for the next however many months it takes for Leo's body to knit itself back together.

"Fake IDs," Donatello mutters over a cold, hurried breakfast, hands shaking around his third cup of coffee and eyes bloodshot to the point where its hard to pick out the edge of his irises. "Probably a couple, just to be safe, with credit cards leading to blind P.O. boxes. I'll get something worked out, just as soon as Leo's—"

There's a big glass jar full of coins in her grandfather's den, but they aren't desperate enough to roll it all out just yet. During her third unsuccessful search of the van for her chapstick, she finds a battered silver Altoids tin jammed purposefully into the struts underneath the passenger seat. Inside is a tightly folded wad of twenties and fifties, thick as her thumb, and this sudden, unexpected reminder of her gentle, fearful, justifiably paranoid father burns hot inside of April's chest.

"Come shopping with me," she says, hooking Casey by the arm. "I need—" To get out of the house. To not be alone. "—another pair of hands."

They stop by the combination feed and hardware store first. It takes them fifteen minutes to decipher Donnie's handwriting on the hastily-scrawled shopping list, then another thirty to track the last of the items down: wrapping tape; half a dozen tubes of various ointments, salts, and what appears to be water-soluble antibiotics; a collection of barbaric-looking tools April is pretty sure were originally meant to shoe horses; a giant jar of quick-dry, ultra hard spackling that she's chillingly certain will be used more or less as its manufacturers intended.

"You kids got a lame horse?" asks the cashier with some confusion, holding the farrier kit in one hand and a length of aquarium tubing in the other. "I can give you a recommendation for a good vet. Something like a split hoof really needs to be left to the professionals."

"We're fine, thanks," April beams forcefully. "Just a sick turtle."

To her disappointment, he doesn't offer up a recommendation for a local reptile specialist.

At the bottom of the list, in Raphael's more legible if no less scrawling script, is a list of herbs and teas that makes April's heart sink. They'd be lucky to find two or three off of the list in high summer, when the farmer's market is crowded with aging, free-spirit yuppies like her father. What are the chances that any of them will be stocked at the dingy local Price Chopper?

"Oh come _on_ ," she groans, rattling the supermarket's locked front door. There's a little handmade sign taped to the inside of the glass— _CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE—_ and all of the aisles beyond are empty and shadowed. "Like anything _else_ could go wrong."

Casey kicks at a rock, sending it flying. The rusted newspaper rack still has a stack of papers from last week, screaming alien invasion in three inch typeface. "Guess we're not the only ones running, huh?"

She doesn't know how to process this place she'd thought of as being _safe_ and _away_ being another person's _far, far too close._

At least the food mart at the gas station is still open, though the selection and prices are enough to make even a jaded New Yorker like Casey cringe. They actually have a dusty box of one of Raphael's obscure ninja healing teas half-hidden behind the energy drinks, however. April clings to that bright spot fiercely, letting it warm her numb hands as they carry the bags (far fewer than she had planned) of groceries across the empty, wind-bitten parking lot.

Casey's thoughts are apparently a mirror of her own. "Think we ought to stop back by that farm store?" he asks as they pull back out onto the highway. In the back, the bags of groceries thunk restlessly against each other. "Maybe pick up one of those big bags of corn?"

Despite herself, April smiles at the mental image of Casey wearing a feed bag while Mikey walks along bent double, clucking and pecking happily as she tosses scattered grain across the floorboards. "I don't think that corn is the kind a regular person can eat, Casey."

"Not us, no, but the guys maybe. They eat all sorts of weird shit."

" _Casey_..." April looks over her shoulder instinctively, but of course the turtles aren't there.

"Worms and trash and whatever that green stuff Donnie's got simmering in his lab is. That place sold bait, right? Let's get them some bait. Nothing like good old fashioned home cooking."

" _Euuugh,_ Casey! Stop being gross!" She laughs as she says it, though, and Casey grins back, eyes glittering with victory.

The old van bumps hard when they pull off the highway and onto the winding, half-mile dirt drive that leads back to the farmhouse. The sun quickly disappears behind the tangle of winter-bare forest, its golden glare all the more blinding whenever it does manage to break through. April settles back in her seat, adjusting the one working passenger heat vent to blow directly into her face. She's determined to enjoy the warmth while it lasts, and Casey, with a knowing look, slows the van to a crawl. She closes her eyes, basking in the successes of their trip, pushing down the disappointments and lingering guilt until they're swallowed by the rumble of the diesel engine as it bumps along the heavily-rutted road.

When they finally pull up to the farmhouse, she's actually managing to feel something like hope. The old house even looks friendlier, its dark windows less eyelike and the yawning porch less like the gaping jaws of a predator.

Maybe, just maybe, they'll get out of this okay.

Ice Cream Kitty is curled up in her bowl in a shady corner of the back porch. She stretches to wakefulness as April climbs the steps with the first load of groceries, marching over and tangling herself between April's legs with a loud, sticky-sweet meow.

"We're all decided then?"

There's frozen condensation covering most of the kitchen window, but April can just make out the green curve of a shell seated at the cramped Formica table. Donnie, she thinks.

"Yeah." That's Raph. "I hate it, but there's no other choice."

"Mikey?"

The door sticks when she tries to open it, the doorknob like ice even through her thick gloves. She shifts the groceries to one hip, adjusts her grip, and leans her weight against the door.

"Mikey, I need to know you're okay with this."

"I'm sorry, it's just—"

The door gives way on the third shove, and she half-stumbles into the dim, steamy kitchen. There's water boiling on the stove as always, but Raphael has strayed far enough from his post to join his brothers at the table, his head resting heavily in his hand. Michelangelo, in the far seat, is the only turtle whose face she can see. He blinks up at her, mouth still half-open on an unspoken syllable, but before she can make heads or tails of his strange, stiff expression his face stretches into a grin, forced mirth rattling down over his features like a brightly graffitied storefront gate.

"Heya Apes! What's shakin'?"

"Hey," she answers reflexively, even as every cell in her brain stem screams out at her that something is wrong, wrong, _wrong_. "What's going on?"

Donatello's head swivels slowly on his long neck. His mask does nothing to hide the dark, sunken pockets beneath his eyes, the shadowed lines of his cheekbones where weeks before there had been the faintest hint still of baby fat. He doesn't blink. He doesn't smile.

"Hi, April," he says dully. "We're going to put Leo down."


	2. Chapter 2

"What's wrong? What did I—"

" _Jeez_ , Donnie, way to phrase that in the worst possible—"

"What are you— _oh!_ Oh, _fuck_! Not like _that_ , April! That's not what I—"

"Just why do you always have to be such a melodramatic snot, anyway?"

"Well excuse _me,_ Mr. Interspecies Diplomacy, for forgetting how the English—"

"It's a good thing," Michelangelo says as he helps her pick up the last of the dropped groceries. "Them fighting."

"Really?" April asks, still breathless with shock and confusion but trying for Mikey's sake to laugh.

"Oh definitely." Mikey's wink is somehow less than reassuring. "When they're really, _really_ worried, they get along _great_."

"What's going on?" Casey shouts from out on the porch. "Can somebody open the damn door! Hands are kind of full, here."

Once Casey's inside and the rest of the groceries are put away, Donnie tries to herd them back towards the warmth of the fire, but Raph complains about his pots boiling over and Mikey insists on bringing Ice Cream Kitty inside for a cuddle so they end up in the chilly-but-within-eyesight-of-the-stove dining room.

"We're not mammals," Donnie explains once everybody's seated. "So it's not _technically_ hibernation. Physiologically speaking, anyway. There's a pretty heated debate in the field about whether it should be called 'brumation' or if that's just a redundant—"

Raphael kicks him underneath the table. _Hard_. "Skip to the conclusion, professor."

" _Anyway_ ," Donnie glares. "We're a bit more complicated because we had some human DNA incorporated into us as part of our mutation, but we still retain the ability. Instinct. Whatever you want to call it."

"Turtles can _hibernate_?" Casey asks, face twisted up in confusion. "What, like bears or something?"

Mikey nods. "We used to do it every winter, when we were little. Seriously freaked Sensei out the first few times, way he tells it. Told it." His faint smile falters. Raphael glares pensively at the dusty tabletop. "We haven't done it in a couple of years, though."

April wracks her brain, trying to remember as much as she can about what Ms. Hackenmueller had said on the subject back in 8th grade biology. "I didn't realize it was something you could grow out of."

"We didn't," Raph grumbles. "Donnie just got a lot better at keeping the heating system going."

Donnie nods. "Underground we didn't have many light cues to trigger the torpor instinct, so keeping the lair temperature steady and warm was enough to power us through it. But the same concept can be applied in reverse, plus we're lucky enough to have the season actually be on our side."

Her mental image of Master Splinter tucking four tiny turtle tots into bed for the winter is quickly replaced by a more harrowing, if somewhat comical, scene where the five of them drag Leo—tub included—out to the front porch like an oversized ice cube tray. She shakes her head, trying to clear it. "How does it work?"

"We put him do— _Under_." He frowns in concentration, mouth silently shaping each word as he works through the translation in his head. "We put him _under_ , and it's like he's in a medically-induced coma. We don't have the drugs to manage his pain levels safely, and all of the stress and lack of real sleep isn't good for him physically or psychologically.

"He's also not conscious enough to manage eating on his own right now, but he _is_ conscious enough to fight us if we try to tube-feed him. If he keeps going like he is his body will burn through all of its reserves before it can even _start_ to lay down new keratin. In hibernation mode it will take longer for him to heal, but his metabolism should be slowed enough to make the process sustainable. He'll be weak when he wakes up, probably need a lot of physical therapy to get on his feet again, let alone back to fighting strength, but he _will_ wake up."

This last comment seems to be directed specifically at Mikey, seated at the far end of the table. Mikey's shoulders hitch up, chin tucked low under the rim of his plastron, and pulls his vaguely-protesting cat closer to his chest.

Casey scrubs at his face with one hand. The patchwork stubble coming in black along the rim of his jaw makes a scratching sound against his rough, fingerless gloves. "So basically, we're going to 'Han Solo' Leo, that's what you're saying? Christ, he's gonna _love_ that."

"Yeah." Raph pushes himself to his feet, nose pointed purposefully towards the kitchen. He pauses behind Mikey's chair, however, hand hovering over his brother's shoulder for an awkward, unsure moment before reaching past him to give Ice Cream Kitty a scratch. She purrs contentedly. "Probably will, the big nerd."

* * *

First things first: Leonardo's shell needs to be stabilized. Any lingering doubts April has about the necessity of Donnie's plan are erased by the empty, animal whimpers Leo makes as Donnie files down the jagged edges of his broken scutes and carefully pushes them back into place. As designated surgical assistant (hers are the only hands small enough to slip the sterilized tubing past the inner join of his shell and drain out the worst of the pus), she tries her best to ignore them, focusing on keeping all of Donnie's makeshift instruments clean and passing him alcohol swabs, spackle, and tape as each item is called for, but they echo in her head for hours afterwards like red, fluttering moths circled around a guttering flame.

"Congrats on not ralphing," Casey says as she scrubs her hands clean in the upstairs bathroom, teeth chattering as the icy water washes yellow suds and dried flakes of dark blood down the drain. "Don't think I could have done it."

She rolls her eyes. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Casey."

"I'm serious," he says indignantly. When she looks up, his face is the same battered ash-white of his hockey mask. "Call Casey Jones anytime you need somebody busted up, but _un_ -busting them? That's a whole different kind of sick."

" _Boys_ ," she says, flicking water at him. He squeals, hands flung up too late to shield him from the splatter of suds, and disappears back down the hall.

Raph and Mikey have been busy raiding the barn for everything Donnie needs to convert the bathroom into a makeshift walk-in cooler. "It's not like we can just crack the window and let nature take its course," Donnie explains as he mounts her Pop Pop's antique Coca-Cola thermostat right above the tub. "If it gets too cold then the water will start to freeze, and we can die of hypothermia as easy as anybody else. We want to keep it somewhere in the low forties, 41.5 Fahrenheit if we can. That'll give us nine and a half degrees temperature variance in either direction. Any warmer than 50 and he'll start to wake up again."

They _do_ end up cracking the window—as uncomfortably chilly as the farmhouse is, it's not nearly cold enough for Donnie's strict standards—but Casey and Raph tack black plastic sheeting over the outside of the window to keep the worst of the wind and the fine mist of freezing rain that's just starting to fall. This plunges the bathroom into near-total darkness, but Donnie assures her that this is also a plus. They've lived their entire lives underground, after all, and Leo has always preferred to sleep in complete darkness.

(This doesn't seem to stop Mikey from insisting that half of the bathroom's one working outlet be dedicated to powering her mother's old butterfly-shaped nightlight, however.)

After monitoring the average temperature swing in the bathroom over the course of a day, Donnie decides to sacrefice some of their bedding to be used as insulation. The old spring mattresses are a lot stiffer and noisier without their egg crate mattress pads, but the foam sandwiched between two layers of quilts is just enough to keep the worst of the cold from leeching back into the farmhouse itself. The effect is eerily whimsical, the smell of bleach and blood at odds with the blanket-fort atmosphere, but

with the last of the cracks sealed with caulk and all of the pipes tightly wrapped in towels to keep them from freezing, the temperature finally stabilizes at a hair above 43 degrees.

"It'll have to do," he sighs. "We'll have to keep an eye on it as the weather changes, but it's enough to put him down."

The cold already seems to be having its intended effect. Leo's eyes are open when they pull him out of the tub for one final water change, but he barely grunts as Raph shifts him over to the towel-padded toilet. Raph stays close, his thick arms cooked carefully under his older brother's shoulders to ease the strain on his cracked shell, crooning reassuring nonsense into his ear as Donnie peels back the bandages to check on his work, but Leo only blinks dully as Casey and April dart in and out of the bathroom under Mikey's barked orders, bearing scrub brushes and soap and buckets of near-scalding water. The youngest turtle attacks the built-up filth with a ruthlessness April has never seen from him in battle, and in no time the cracked porcelain is a gleaming, sterile white, fifty years of stains scrubbed clean by his hands.

April can't help but be impressed. "You never clean your room like that."

Mikey shrugs his shoulders matter-of-factly. "Senseidoesn't brush his teeth twice a day in my room."

By the time the tub is refilled and Donnie has installed something that he insists is an algae filter but that looks more like the business end of a leaf blower jammed on top of her Gran's old blender, Leonardo's eyes are little more than white slits. Raphael's humming has taken on the cadence of a meditative chant, and as they slip him back into the water April's surprised to see that Donatello and Michelangelo are both mouthing softly along. She listens more intently, but while she recognizes some of the words from her sessions with Master Splinter the meaning is lost to her beyond a general impression carved out by the soft, lilting cadence: half lullaby, half command, a call waiting longingly for a response.

Ten minutes later, Donnie slips his hand below the waterline and presses it against Leo's throat, feeling out his pulse. Casey and Raph huddle close, watching intently as he bends lower over the tub, hand sliding down beneath the lip of his plastron to gauge the depth and pace of his breathing. Mikey, to April's surprise, seems to have drifted back from the group. He huddles next to the nightlight, hands jammed under his armpits and hopping from one foot to the next in an effort to keep warm.

"That's it," Donnie announces. "He's down."

"Huh." Casey peers incredulously down into the tub. "Thought it would take longer."

"His body was pretty much primed for it, sustaining so many major injuries like that. We're basically just using his own instincts against him." Donatello's knees pop audibly as he stands. He cracks his neck for good measure, looking as exhausted as ever but faintly pleased. "He should be out of it until spring."

"Wait," Mikey frowns, eye ridges furrowed deeply behind his mask. " _Spring?_ But I thought—"

"Any earlier than that and we'd just have to put him back down again," Donnie says firmly. "It'll take at least that long for his shell to heal. Otherwise he could hurt himself further just trying to get around."

Mikey sucks in a long, jagged breath, blows it out again. It mists in the now-frigid bathroom.

Raph lays a heavy hand on his shoulder. There's no hesitation behind his touch this time. "C'mon, bro. Let's get you warmed up."

Mikey's most recent growth spurt means that Raph is officially the shortest of the turtles, but his thick arms are still long enough to sweep all of them out of them gently from the room. At the doorway April looks back and catches one last look of Leo in the water, hands floating loose at his sides and knees breaking the surface like twin islands. It's not carbonite that she thinks of, but a poster that Irma (the alien inside of Irma?) had tacked above her bed: Ophelia floating in a dark, green-shrouded stream, eyes empty and mouth open as slowly she slipped into the black.

* * *

That night, April wakes up to a light, cool touch on her shoulder.

"Wassahmmpf?"

"Sorry," whispers a familiar voice. "It's me."

"Mmm..." Mikey. "W'issit?"

There's a long, silent pause, long enough that she almost drifts off again. "Can I sleep with you tonight?"

April peels open her eyes, blinking hard to clear the gunk crusted there. There's a light on in the kitchen, casting Raph and Donnie's huddled silhouettes onto the far wall of the living room. Across from her, a limp, human hand dangles off the edge of a mattress, identifying the softly snoring heap of blankets and old coats as one Casey Jones. Mikey is crouched low next to her own mattress, stripped of his gear and with a heavy blanket draped across his shoulders.

"Yeah," she says, surprising herself. "Sure. Hop in." She raises the edge of her blanket invitingly, and he slips underneath it as quick as a flash, his own blanket still clutched tightly in his fists. The resulting tangle takes some shifting to sort out, but eventually they both settle into a comfortable position.

"All of your pillows smell funny," he mumbles, face-down and arms tucked tightly beneath his body. "Why is that?"

April takes a deep breath, but other than a faint whiff of dust and stale potpourri she can't smell anything odd. "That's just the way a lot of old people's houses smell. Gran used to tuck dryer sheets into the pillow cases to keep them fresh, maybe that's what you're smelling."

"Hmm," he sighs. "Humans are weird."

She's too tired to argue the point further, so she burrows deeper into the covers. The curve of Mikey's shell makes a little pocket where the blankets lay over her like a tent. She curls her feet up into the hollow and waits for sleep to wash back over her, but every time the dark waves start to lap over her something sharp seems to yank them back. Struggling on the knife edge of sleep, it takes April several minutes to accept that the sensation isn't imagined. The waves wash higher, almost enough to drown her, and she sees it, a bright and jagged _something_ turning fretfully in Mikey's head.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"'Bout what?"

His reply is oddly muffled. She opens her eyes, puzzled, only to find that his face is still buried deep in the pillow's plush folds, despite his protests bout the smell.

" _Mikey_..."

He sighs—the covers pull away from her slightly, then fall again as he exhales—and finally turns to face her. His eyes look even huger without his mask, round and glittering in the firelight, the blue nearly drowned by the orange, flickering glow.

"I had a nightmare."

"About home?" She knows those far too well. Glistening pink flesh twisting horrors out of what had once been familiar and comforting.

He shakes his head. "No, about Leo."

"Oh, Mikey." She reaches out instinctively, hand cupping the cool curve of his shell. "He's going to be okay. Donnie's taking good care of him."

"I know that, it's just—" He shifts restlessly, burrowing deeper into the blankets. "It freaks me out," he whispers at length.

"The crack in his shell?"

"No," he says, hushed. Like it's a secret. Or a monster that slips out of the dark at the first call of its name. "Hibernating."

She blinks, surprised. "I thought you guys used to do it every year."

"We did, yeah." He frowns. "Doesn't mean I liked it, though."

April turns on her side to look at him better, one hand jammed under her own pillow for support. "Is it scary?"

"Don't know about anybody else," he shrugs. "Leo never complained, and Raph's not one to let anything slip if Leo doesn't crack first. Donnie always brushes it off like it's no big deal, but I think that's just his way of trying to get me less freaked by the whole thing."

"What's it like?" she asks. "For you, I mean."

"It's—" He takes a deep, steadying breath. "Y'know sometimes, when you're falling asleep, there's this moment where it feels like something's pulling at you all over, sucking you down? But right before you fall, right before you slip backward off of the edge of... whatever it is, something inside you jerks and you wake up again?"

She nods.

"Well," Mikey whispers. "It's like that. 'Cept there's no jerk back up again. You just fall, and fall, and fall."

"You mean you don't dream?" April says. "I'd think you'd have lots of dreams, given how long you're asleep."

"But you're _not_ asleep," he says. "So you don't dream. And you're not dead, so you don't _not_ dream. You're not warm, or cold, or hungry, or tired. Not happy or sad, or sick, or wistful. You're just... _Just.._."

April waits for Michelangelo to continue, but he just stares at her entreatingly.

"Just... you?" she guesses.

"Yeah," he sighs. "Just you. All alone, inside of yourself."

There's a loud pop from the fireplace as a burning log splits and collapses under the weight of the other tinders. April tries to imagine what it would like to be one after so long as a set of four.

"Is it like that when you meditate?" she asks at length. "It's not for me, but maybe I'm doing it wrong."

"No," he says. "It's not for me, either." He chews thoughtfully at his lip, gaze drifting. "Master Splinter tried to treat them the same, but he's never _done_ it, he doesn't _know_. But, like, there's _nothing_ he doesn't know, so what does that—"

He freezes mid-syllable, eyes wide and locked on the darkness behind her. Before April has had the time to even blink in surprise Michelangelo is gone, leaving nothing but a gap in the blankets and a draft of cold air in his wake.

"Mikey?" She twists around, panic spiking as the heavy blankets twist with her, restricting her movement. "Mikey, what's—"

" _Shh!_ " he hisses, crouched low in front of the window with his face almost flush against the glass. There's a hardness to his tense limbs that she recognizes from the windup before battle. She kicks the blankets off with a grunt, then immediately regrets it as her fans are instantly lost in an ocean of quilts and paisley duvets. _Great_.

At least she's not alone in her alarm. Michelangelo's swift, silent movement has caught the attention of his brothers, Donatello and Raphael materializing in the doorway with weapons drawn and bodies braced for a fight.

"What is it?" Raph growls. The orange firelight glints eagerly off of the tips of his sais. "What do you see?"

"Guys..."

Finally, April manages to stagger to her feet, a fan clenched in one hand and the other curled into a tiger claw. From this angle she can see Mikey's reflection, his mouth a small, soft circle of awe, slowly but surely curling upwards at the corners. Casey snores on, oblivious.

"It's _snowing_."


	3. Chapter 3

It's gentle at first. Enchanting. Like being in a movie set, or the middle of a Christmas card. Something simple and beautiful to look at, a white blanket slowly slipping over her shoulders to shield her from the hard, frozen truth of her life.

It snows all night and all of the next day. As soon as the sun is up Michelangelo all but drags his brothers outside for a snowball fight, not that Raphael and Donatello really need that much convincing. They look ridiculous in their crudely fashioned ponchos, arm warmers, and thigh high leg wrappings, but Donnie's rusted but triumphant crowing as he nails a bellowing Raph right between the eyes feels like seeing land after long months lost at sea. April flops gracelessly into a slowly-swelling snowbank and makes the biggest snow angel she can.

Casey, despite a love of the ice, spends several minutes on the porch complaining about not wanting to get slush down his only pair of jeans until the four of them let fly with a barrage of snowballs seemingly on cue. It's a total free for all after that, the dirtiest, no-holds-barred game of ninja snowball seen in at least two hundred years.

It's the cold that finally wins out, driving them all inside to a lunch of tomato soup sopped up with thick fistfuls of toasted bread while their clothes steam dry in front of the fire (Mikey and a toga-sheeted Casey are the only ones brave enough to try making grilled cheese with the questionably dented can of Insta Cheez they'd found in the back of one of the cabinets).

Donnie keeps disappearing upstairs to check on Leo, and Raph keeps following after to check on them both, but as the afternoon wears on and the snow continues to fall silent and thick around the old farmhouse, April drags out a battered copy of Risk from the den closet and manages to lure everyone back to the fire. Donnie is the first to fall asleep sometime shortly after four, exhaustion finally overtaking him with the full force of a runaway train, but with the early sunset none of them manages to make it to half past seven, worn out and warm with laughter.

When they awake the next morning, the snow hasn't stopped, is coming thicker than ever from a sky slate grey with roiling storm clouds.

"Jesus," Casey mumbles. "Look at that."

"Yeah." Mikey's been more or less glued to the window ever since it got light enough to see. The word ghosts white across the glass. "It's like, _majorly_ Jack Kerouac out there."

"London," Donnie corrects absent-mindedly, also transfixed by the dense cascade of flakes.

"Same diff," Mikey shrugs.

As worrying as the increasingly-heavy snowfall is, April _really_ has to pee, which means braving the icy porcelain of the upstairs toilet.

She finishes as quick as she can, glowering at the frost icing its way across the lone, lace-curtained window. Hopefully Donnie will get started on fixing the furnace today. Much as she loves the guys, there's only so long _anyone_ could expect to stand being trapped in one room with four teenage boys.

Halfway down the stairs, April hears the soft sound of a door closing below. She's not surprised at all when Raphael emerges from the hallway. Apparently she wasn't the only one who felt compelled to visit a bathroom.

"How's Leo?"

"The same." Something about his stride and the brooding set of his brow ridge reminds her of Master Splinter, an effect enhanced by the red plaid quilt draped heavily around his shoulders. "Temperature's dropped a lot since yesterday, but the thermometer's still in range."

Back in the living room, Mikey is camped out on the couch under a small mountain of blankets, watching Donnie fiddle with the television and offering occasional commentary. The ancient wooden set was an archaeological relic a decade before April was born, but Donnie seems to have gotten it working all right. He hasn't blown a fuse yet, at least, and the smell of ozone and dust being burned off of circuit boards is almost homey. April plops down next to Mikey and wiggles her way under a sun-bleached comforter. The TV screen shows nothing but snow, and not the kind that's slowly burying them.

"Where's Casey?" asks Raph. He doesn't join the blanket pile, but he does steal a few layers off the top to start a nest of his own.

As one, Mikey and Donnie raise one finger to their beaks.

"Nose goes out into the blizzard to get more firewood," Mikey explains, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. "Should be back in a couple of minutes"

Raph shoots one glance towards the front window before settling down with a grunt. "You actually trying to pick up something on that thing, Don, or are you just fucking around?"

Donnie doesn't waver from his intense study of the silently flickering static, one hand twisting the antenna back and forth while the other clicks deliberately through the channels. "I'm trying to find a news station with a weather report, see how long this storm is going to last."

Raph frowns, shrugging his quilt higher up his neck. "I thought we didn't get any reception out here."

" _Cell_ reception," Mikey chirps. "S'like, totally different from how TV works. Different radio waves and signal towers and stuff."

Despite the intensity of his concentration, Donatello's mouth twitches upward briefly in traitorous amusement. This is apparently a rather truncated summary of a recently delivered and far more technical explanation. "There's no digital converter, but we're far enough upstate that maybe the local broadcasters haven't made the switch from analogue to digital yet. The snow doesn't help things, but theoretically all you need is the right antenna and a little fine tuning and— _aha!_ "

April sees it, too, a smear of streaky color flickering amidst the snow. Donnie experiments first with the right rabbit ear, then the left, positioning them at various points in space with the care of a surgeon. Slowly the smear expands to line, blue on green that skitters up and down across the screen before vanishing just as abruptly back into the black and white chaos. Donnie sticks his tongue out, body swaying with each adjustment as if he and the antenna were one, but nothing else emerges from the static. With a shrug, he changes stations and starts again.

Channel 4 flickers with further promise, the bands of color jumbled but unmistakably flesh-toned beneath a faint green tinge, and with two seemingly inconsequential flicks of Donnie's fingers the rearrange themselves into slightly warped head and shoulders of a woman, her tightly bobbed hair and crisply pressed sport jacket marred only by the occasional stray streak of static.

 _NATIONAL GUARD STRETCHED THIN_ reads the boxed headline hovering just behind her head. Her expression is concerned but faintly distant, the classic disconnect of the serious news anchor.

As one, April, Raphael, and Michelangelo lean forward. "What's she saying?" Mikey asks. "Dude, what's she—"

"I don't know, Mikey, because there's no _sound,_ " Donnie snaps, making further micro-adjustments to no avail. "Next channel."

Channel 5 is nothing but static again, but 6 resolves itself almost instantly into what appears to be a news conference. April recognizes the governor behind a sea of microphones, her lips thin and her fleece-collared coat zipped all the way to her throat. The reception is still poor, the governor and her rapidly signing ASL translator drifting in and out as the picture jumps and fuzzes under Donatello's careful tuning. It's all April can do to make out the news crawl flickering at the bottom of the screen.

 _HISTORIC STORM BURIES UPSTATE NEW YORK. GOVERNOR DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY. MARTIAL LAW STILL IN EFFECT FOR..._

April strains her ears, trying to untangle the governor's words from the faint electric whine of the set, but all she can hear is the tick of the mantel clock and the weary groans of the farmhouse as it pushes back against the wind.

"Can you turn on closed captioning, bro?"

Mikey's tone is gentle, non-accusatory, but that just seems to make Donnie's teeth grit all the harder. He smacks the side of the TV hard enough to make April flinch, but nothing happens.

"It doesn't make _sense_. If the transmitter's picking up picture then it should get sound as well. But we weren't even getting _static_ sound before, so maybe it—oh."

Embarrassed, he reaches for the sound dial and turns up the volume.

"—izens are advised to shelter in place for their own safety and to ensure that the roads remain clear for first responders and military support."

"Has the President extended the martial law zone in response to this storm?" shouts a reporter, unprompted.

"Not at this time, no." A chorus of camera flashes and low murmuring from the press pool.

"Any comment on the rumors that the alien menace is somehow involved?"

The governor's expression sours. Donnie clucks his tongue dismissively, but April squirms in her seat, scalp prickling.

"The threat posed by this storm is very real and very serious. There's no need to embellish it with baseless tabloid conspiracy theories."

"So the possibility that the invaders possess some sort of weather altering technology is—"

The rest of the reporter's question is cut off by a sudden, deafening tone. Donnie jerks back, startled, and Mikey slaps his hands over his ears with a whine of complaint. The picture switches abruptly to a map of the surrounding counties superimposed with broad swatches of shifting color.

"THIS IS THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SIGNAL," blares a formal, robotic voice. "A SEVERE WINTER WEATHER ALERT HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR YOUR AREA. HEAVY SNOWFALL AND HIGH WINDS EXPECTED THROUGH 2AM, WITH RAPIDLY FALLING TEMPERATURES AND CONTINUED HEAVY SNOWFALL AND LIGHT WINDS THROUGH—"

"Turn it off!" growls Raph.

Donnie scowls at him, annoyed. "I know it's loud, but this is what—"

" _Off!"_ Raph hisses, eyes darting around the room with alarm. "I heard something."

Donatello instantly mutes the TV. April turns in her seat, trying to find what it is that has Raphael so on edge, and notices with alarm how much dimmer the living room has gotten in the last few minutes. Every window has gone flat and grey, the storm outside impossible to peer through.

"I don't hear—"

Wait, she _does_. There, over by the door. Under the wind, under the tick of the clock and the hiss of her frozen breath, a low, continuous scratching sound.

"That's just Casey," Mikey says, though he sounds far from certain. "He's pissed he had to get all the firewood and is trying to scare us."

"You think?" Raph rises from the couch, blankets falling away to reveal a sai already clenched in each fist. Donnie and Mickey share a look, then as one they stand, shouldering off their restrictive wrappings and reaching for their weapons. Raph turns to her, eyes white.

"You get the door. Stay tucked behind it until we know what's out there. We'll be off to the side ready to jump if it tries to force itself in."

He might have looked like Splinter earlier, but he's trying to sound like Leo now. He doesn't quite pull it off, but this isn't the moment to bring that up to him.

They all take their positions, the turtles tucked out of immediate site but still within a sword's strike of the door. April takes hold of the doorknob, heart hammering so hard she can feel it in her fingertips. The scratching is louder now, more insistent. Beneath the wind she swears she can hear something low and animal, a whining, echoing growl that makes her think of ice scraping against the hull of a ship.

"On the count of three," Raph whispers. "One, two..."

April's barely finished turning the knob before the door rips itself from her hands, slamming hard against the foyer wall. Something cold and yowling whips by her feet, and at first she thinks it's the wind, but then she registers a familiar shape within the white and pink blur racing headlong down the foyer.

"Kitty!" Mikey's delighted surprise twists quickly into horror. "Oh no, _Kitty!_ Baby, I didn't mean to—"

Ice Cream Kitty meows piteously, trembling and nearly unrecognizable under a thick coat of frost. She cowers when Michelangelo reaches for her, ears back and tail stiff with icicles.

"Left you out in the storm!" he wails. "My Icky-poo! I'm _sorry_ , I thought—!"

Donnie sags in relief and reaches to close the door, but April stops him, a horrifying realization coming over her.

"It _wasn't_ Casey," she says. Donnie blinks at her in confusion, but Raph, to his left, suddenly straightens with alarm.

"CASEY!" he bellows, pushing past his brother and out the front door. " _CASEY!_ "

April follows him out, and is instantly struck by a buckshot blast of hard, tiny flakes. She staggers briefly against the sting, blinking to clear her eyes and make sense of the white, icy cave that had once been the front porch. A large snowdrift has all but swallowed the far end of the porch, and even in the more sheltered portions gathering snow has rounded out all of the hard wooden corners. There are several armloads worth of wood dumped right next to the front door, but with the exception of a few slushy footsteps there's no further sign of Casey. She peers out in the direction of the woodpile, but between the wind and the increasingly thick snowfall it's like staring into the static of the television all over again. What little of the yard she can see has been swept clean of further footprints. It's like Casey stepped off of the porch and into thin air.

Raphael has his hands cupped around his face, pacing up and down the edge of the porch and shouting into the storm as loudly as he can. "CASEY, _CASEY!_ KAAAAAY-SEEEEE _JONES_! I'M GONNA POUND YOUR SKINNY YETI ASS, I FUCKING SWEAR. KAAAY- _SEEE_ -!"

One green leg swings determinedly over the edge of the porch, ready to propel it's owner headlong into the hunt, but a long, equally green arm grabs reaches out and yanks him back.

"Are you _insane?!_ " Donnie squawks, eyes wild and mask tails flapping violently in the wind. "You'll _freeze_ out there!"

"And he won't?" Raph spits, twisting fruitlessly in his brother's iron grip, anger and panic overriding the skill of his strong, bare limbs.

" _You'll freeze_ FASTER!"

Distantly, April feels herself turning, feels the dull impact of each step as numb legs carry her through the golden light of the front door and back into the huddled warmth of the farm house. Michelangelo is crouched low in front of the sofa, an Igloo ice box in one hand, trying to coax Ice Cream Kitty out from her hiding place.

"S'okay, Kitty. Not gonna put you outside. Just a bit too warm in here for you, let's get into your cooler. Good kitty, _good_ kitty—"

Nobody is there to stop her as she marches towards Casey's makeshift bed, grabbing up as many coats as she can from the pile he's been sleeping under.

Not all of them will fit over her own hoodie and coat, and it takes a few seconds of fumbling trial and error before she successfully layers two of Pop Pop's old hunting jackets over a puffy black quilted duster that must have been her mother's. There's no time to go digging for a good pair of earmuffs, so she pulls her wool knit cap low over her ears and double wraps a long fleece scarf around her head and over her mouth and nose.

"April, what are you doing?"

Donatello has a fuming Raphael by the back of the shell, having successfully dragged him all but kicking and screaming back inside. There's snow dusted along both of their shoulders and in the hollows of their plastrons. Behind them, the TV continues to flash maps of their local area dotted with small icons of snowflakes paired with temperature forecasts dipping closer and closer to zero.

"Casey's lost." Her voice doesn't quiver, not even once. "I'm going to go find him."

" _No_ ," Donnie says reflexively, and his fear from the porch is brighter now, sharper edged. "Absolutely not."

"'Cause _I'm_ going," growls Raph, teeth clenched tightly to keep from chattering. "Just as soon as I—"

"I'm going," she repeats, "to _find_ him." It is not an argument. It is not a negotiation. It is _fact_. She has to—

"What's going on?" Mikey appears, Igloo tucked tightly against his chest with one hand clamped on the lid to keep his still-protesting cat contained. His eyes widen as he looks from April to Donnie to Raph to the space where Casey _should_ be and back again, piecing things together. " _April,_ what—"

"You can't," Donnie pleads. "April, you _can't_."

"Who then? _Who_ , Donnie? Because I only see one mammal around here with hands small enough to wear these gloves." She holds up one hand and wiggles her fingers stiffly at him. How long has Casey been out there now? Half an hour? An hour? She pictures him setting off for the woodpile, lanky shoulders hunched against the wind, grumbling about the cold but wearing little more than a ripped up hoodie and a bandana in a fit of foolish teenage machismo. Primate versus reptile, flaunting his ability to thermoregulate in order to sooth the stinging loss of a simple childhood game.

With a rapid series of gestures, the brothers hold a quick, silent conference among themselves. Raphael and Donatello both argue their cases passionately, with Michelangelo offering the occasional pleading interjection, but in the end all seem to come to the same grim conclusion.

Now it's Donnie's turn to play at being Leo. He swallows heavily, stretching himself to his full height.

"You're going to need a tether. Let me see if we have any rope."

They don't, but just as she's about to storm back out the door tether or no tether Mikey offers up his kusarigama. Based on her mental map of the farmyard the chain is just barely long enough to reach the woodpile, but it's better than nothing. April doesn't let herself think about what she'll do if Casey's blundered out towards the woods, beyond her reach.

Her first instinct is to tie the chain off on one of the porch posts, but Donnie insists on holding onto it personally. "I'm going to keep it taught and feed it out to you slowly," he says, the gravity of his tone contrasting sharply with the bright paisley print of the tablecloth he's wrapped over his poncho as an hastily improvised windbreaker. "The _moment_ it goes slack we're coming after you, got it?"

She frowns, still displeased that he's out here at all. Mikey and Raph, huddled in the open doorway, look less than thrilled, as well, though probably for different reasons. "Wait, so what happens if I trip or have to backtrack? You going to reel me in like a fish on a line?"

"I'll give you a second to get back on your feet, then jerk the chain twice. If you don't jerk twice back, we'll know you're in trouble."

 _As if I wasn't already_ , she thinks, and checks again that the chain is secured tightly around her waist. "When I find him I'll give three yanks so you know we're coming back, three and then two again if I need somebody to come help me drag him back in."

"Yeah, yeah, sounds good." His voice cracks, but his grip on the chain is steady, his feet braced against the stray arctic blasts that whip their way across the porch. "Good luck."

There's no use standing around and wasting further time. With one last tug on her scarf, April steps off of the porch and into a white abyss.


	4. Chapter 4

"Ya-me!"

April does her best to comply with her sensei's barked command, arms pinwheeling to catch her balance as she wobbles dangerously on one foot. It's a close call, but she finally manages to steady herself, right leg trembling faintly under the strain of holding the half-completed pose.

Intellectually, she knows that there's no way she can seriously hurt herself if she falls from the low balance beam. She's certainly fallen from higher places onto much less forgiving surfaces than the padded dojo floor, and has the scars and still-crusted scraped knee (thank you, Karai) to prove it.

 _Blindfolded_ , however, it certainly _feels_ a lot more treacherous.

Master Splinter can move as silent as the stars when he wants to, so the faint flutter of cloth and drag of his tail across the wool carpet as he circles her is more of a politeness, as are the non-committal noises in his throat as he reaches out and adjusts the position of her fists.

"Tell me, Miss O'Neil, where are you, in this moment?"

"Uh..." The muscles in her lower back start to quiver dangerously. She hopes Master Splinter can't see how much she's starting to sweat under the blindfold. "Do you mean, like, physically? Or mentally?"

"Yes," he answers unhelpfully.

April chews over his question for a moment, decides to get the obvious answers out of the way.

"I'm in the dojo," she says. "About fifty feet down from the news stand on 40th and 7th. I'm eighteen inches from the end of the balance beam, facing north—no, north _east_ —about halfway through the Heidan Shodan kata."

"And your spirit?" Master Splinter prompts, though not unkindly. "Where is _it_?"

"Not here," she admits reluctantly. "Don't get me wrong, I _want_ to be, but I keep thinking about my dad."

"Do not apologize, my child. While the ninja must maintain a strong awareness of their own self within the universe, we do not always have control of the places our minds and bodies linger. Even if it is impossible to compartmentalize, however, to separate the _wantings_ from the _beings_ , we must still remain _aware_ of our selfhood. You have lost him, but you cannot find him if you do not know where _you_ are. Your chi must become a fixed point in chaotic space, a home fire that you can return to at the end of a long night searching. Do you understand?"

April nods. Every muscle fiber from her ankles to the base of her neck scream out in agony. "Hai, Sensei."

"Good. Continue."

Relieved, she lowers her trembling foot, weight shifting forward instinctively in anticipation of the last pose before her turn, and tumbles off of the end of the balance beam with a grunt.

"Oh," says Master Splinter mildly. "And to correct an earlier misconception, you were actually _four_ inches from the end of the beam."

* * *

April stumbles on the first step, her foot vanishing knee-deep into a deceptively solid-looking snowdrift. She teeters momentarily—hyper-conscious of Donnie's anxious bulk behind her, ready to catch her if she falls—before finding her center again. She shoves her brief embarrassment to one side, focusing instead on finding the next solid patch of ground before her.

By the fifth step she's gotten a better feel for the way the snow gives and crunches under her boots, has learned to hold her arms out and lift her legs high to clear the top of each drift rather than waste energy forcing her way through it. She can almost feel her sensei's ghost standing at her shoulder, watching and nodding faintly with approval.

" _Wooo,_ lookit that! S'what I'm _talkin'_ 'bout, Apes! Show that snow who's the kuno _ichi_ , YEAH!"

April can't help but smile behind her scarf. She shoots Michelangelo a quick thumbs up but keeps her attention set dead ahead. If she drifts from her heading even slightly this early in the game she could overshoot the wood pile completely. Already it's a struggle to stay oriented; without the meager protection of the porch the icy wind hits her like a wall, shoving her sideways and blurring what little she can see of the horizon.

The horrifying truth of it is that Casey could be _anywhere_. He could be that lump of snow on her left, or curled up on the top step of the back door, his knocks unheard and slowly weakening. She can't let herself dwell on it, though, or else she'll end up running in fruitless circles, so she keeps her focus on the one place she's certain he _has_ been. Once she's there, and once she's certain Casey's not _still_ there, then she'll figure out what she needs to do next.

Ten steps out Mikey shouts after her again, but the wind smashes all of the words together into one indecipherable string of vowels and muffled consonants. April risks a brief glance back, and is alarmed to see that the farmhouse is little more than a vague, dark mass behind her, a suggestion of structure in a world of swirling white.

Twenty steps out, another glance back. The farmhouse, her friends, the rest of the known universe, has vanished completely. Even the chain tethered at her waist seems to fade in and out of existence, the icy glimmer of metal trembling taught behind her for half a dozen feet before it, too, is swallowed the whirling blizzard.

And there's no denying that's what this is. A full-on blizzard, the worst she's ever seen. The snow is falling thick as static now, sticking on her pants and the dark sleeves of her coat until it's difficult to make out her own limbs in the complete white-out. April focuses on her breathing, the quick but unwavering thump of her heart in her chest, and does her best to ignore the disorienting sensation. She is a fixed point in space, a pivot around which the universe passes at her leisure. She can do this. She can _do_ this!

" _Casey!_ " she shouts. No answer but the howling wind. She loosens her scarf, choking momentarily on her first full lungful of icy air, but the shock of it only makes her bellow louder. " _CASEY!_ "

Nothing. Nothing but the wind shrieking back at her, mockingly.

She's going to find him. She _has_ to find him.

In some places the snow piles in drifts nearly waist high. April manages to clamor over the tops of some of the more solid ones—frantically consulting her mental map of the farmyard and trying to remember what stump or bird bath could be at its center and their general location relative to the wood pile—but others she has no choice but to carefully edge her way around.

Slow, _too_ slow. How long as she been out here now? Not nearly as long as Casey. She squints against the stinging snow, wishing she had thought to rummage through her Pop Pop's things for a pair of goggles, and examines every lump and hollow for the edge of a black kerchief, the heavily-scuffed toe of a buried Converse sneaker. She flings her arms wide into the gale, hoping to scoop him out of the flurry of kicked-up powder, but her fingers close on nothing but air and—

 _Thwam!_

"Ffffff _fuck_!" Whatever she hit, it was hard enough to hurt even ice-numbed hands. April allows herself half a second to swear and shake the injured limb indignantly. Donnie must sense trouble—the chain jerks twice. _You okay?_

With fresh blood warming her throbbing fingers, she yanks twice in answer. _I'm okay_.

Carefully this time, April reaches out, feeling around for the hard edge of whatever it was she'd slammed into. Eventually she finds it—a solid circle larger than her hand suspended at roughly chest height, hard on one side and slightly curved on the other. Puzzled, she explores further, finds a metal strut jutting perpendicularly from a broad, flat surface, and with a jolt she realizes it's the _van_ , almost completely buried in a gust-driven snowpack.

Hope, tangy and dizzying, surges through her. _What if Casey is inside_? While not an ideal shelter, the van would certainly provide protection from the wind and driving snow. She can just see him, teeth chattering, bare fingers fumbling with the nearly frozen latch, the relief on his face as the door popped open and he collapsed across the cracked leather seats to catch his breath and wait for a clearing in the storm.

Heart hammering louder than ever, April edges her way around to the lee of the van, where the snow barely comes up to the top of the tires.

"Jones!" She wipes the powder from the passenger side window with three quick swipes of her glove so she can peer inside. "You in there?"

The van is empty.

Disappointment is harder to dismiss than embarrassment, she discovers.

Okay. Okay. If she remembers right, they'd parked perpendicular to the house, with the nose of the van pointed more or less towards the barn. That means she's drifted off course slightly but is theoretically within a dozen strides of her goal. After working her way back around to the front driver's side corner of the van, careful to let Donnie reel in the slack as she goes, April checks her orientation against her mental map, adjusts her angle by twenty degrees to the left, and strikes off again, counting her steps as she goes.

 _...eleven, twelve, thirteen..._

Just as she's starting to doubt herself , April spots a dark, irregular texture amid the otherwise featureless tundra. It's the wood pile.

"Casey, I'm here! _Casey!_ " She works over every inch of the wood pile, scraping back snow and kicking at every human-sized lump. She circles around it twice, lifting the chain as she goes to avoid getting tangled, widening her search slightly with each pass before conceding that he isn't there.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, but she chokes it down resolutely, reminding herself that she'd planned from the beginning for this to be the true _start_ of her search. She knows Casey, knows that he'd never be one to do the sensible thing and stay put near a prominent landmark in the event that he got lost.

After all, this _is_ Casey Jones, the boy who who leapt gleefully into his first fight with a mutant. The boy whose trigonometry homework is ringed with elaborate doodles of a taller, stronger, always-masked version of himself, who calls her Red and steals her makeup wipes when he thinks she isn't looking, whose palm sweats whenever he holds her hand even as he shrugs off battle-lost teeth with a shrug, who's worn her body while she wore his, who _gets_ her even when he says he doesn't. She knows him. She _knows_ him.

April closes her eyes to the storm, to the cold, to the fear, makes herself focus on Casey, the echo of him that seems to linger in her peripheral vision whenever they spend time together. Casey has this... this _glint_ to him. Silver and sharp as a blade for the most part, but jagged at the ends like a skate that's been dug hard into rough ice.

It's hard to stay focused as the wind pushes at her, screaming and tearing at her clothing, but slowly, slowly, she starts to sink. Endless white fades to grey, then black, and the numbness in her toes and fingertips spreads slowly across her body. Distantly, she can feel two distinct pulls at her waist. She ignores them, teeth gritted against the interruption to her concentration. _Where, where_...

 _There_. It's dim, distant, but unmistakable, like the far twinkle of a star on a foggy night. Two more pulls at her waist, frantic, stronger. She answers them, not wanting to be pulled back from that glint, not now, when she's so close, when it feels like every atom of her body is honed to its frequency.

Chain behind her, glint ahead, April staggers on, past the wood pile and towards the tall, dark smudge that is the edge of the woods. Casey must have gotten turned around and mistaken it for the house, not knowing that each step he took carried him further and further away from his goal. He must have—

The chain yanks her to a hard stop. April tugs at it, annoyed, but it doesn't give another inch. Donnie's pulls feel almost apologetic, now. _That's it_ , she can almost hear him say. _That's all there is._

She gropes ahead of her, frantic, but Casey's still out of reach. How far, she can't tell. Maybe one step. Maybe ten, maybe fifty. The smart thing to do would be to wind her way back to the house, careful to keep his position fixed in her mind, and upend every closet looking for anything they could use to make her tether longer. Maybe stop by the van on the way, grab the jump cables from the back. Rip the lacings out of all of the shoes, tie every sheet they haven't ripped into bandages together into a long chain, cut the cords off of the tv and all of the lamps. _Anything_. Donatello would probably make her sit in front of the fire to warm up before letting her back out again, might even try to argue that she _shouldn't_ go back, let him or Raph or Mikey go, it's okay, they can take it, they may be nearly-naked reptiles but they're _ninjas_ , they can _take it_ , they'll—

The metal chain is like a belt of ice around her waist, even through her thick coat. It's a struggle to undo Mikey's expert knot, her fingers numb and her gloves stiff with ice. "Come on," she pants, the damp wool of her scarf sour with dripping snot. "Come _on..._ "

The knot loosens, slips free. Left hand fisted tight around the handle of the kusarigama, April carefully unwinds it. The first loop gives her an extra two feet of chain, the second another two feet. When the last of it finally slips free, she takes a final half-step into the storm, stretching ahead of her as far as she can. The wind kicks up a fresh blind of snow, and there's no doubt that if she dropped the kusarigama now she'd never find it again. She might still find Casey, but what good would that do either of them?

"Casey Jones, you _jerk_!" Of course there's no answer. Her left hand slips two inches down the handle, her right hand prods another two inches of snow. "Do you even _want_ to be saved, asshole? Do you? 'Cause I'm _literally_ at the end of my rope, here!" She laughs, frantic. If she lays down, she can stretch her body out and kick that snowdrift five feet ahead. It certainly _looks_ like an ungrateful, spindly, self-aggrandizing piece of—

" _Ow_ ," groans the snow directly beneath her left boot. "Tha' _hur's_..."

* * *

She kicks him twice to be sure she's not hearing things ("Stoppit, stoppit, _owww!_ Jesus!") before yanking frantically on the chain, three pulls then two.

It feels like an age before two blanket-shrouded figures emerge from the blizzard, bent low against the wind and working their way hand over hand like they were climbing straight up the side of a building instead of crossing less than 100 feet of flat farmyard. April's managed to dig most of Casey's torso out of the snow, but with one hand clinging desperately to their only lifeline and the rest of her slowly turning into ice it's hard going. One of the turtles—she can't make out exactly which, maybe Raphael judging by the breadth of his shoulders—pulls him the rest of the way out and flings him over his shell in a fireman's carry. The other turtle wraps thick arms around her, clucking sternly when he realizes she's untied the chain, and hoists her out of the snow.

"I can walk," April protests, ignoring the fact that her legs feel like two giant popsicles.

"Sure you can," says Michelangelo, the orange of his mask just discernible under the snow caking his gear. "Doesn't mean you gotta."

He does, however, allow her the dignity of a bridal carry.

Donatello is waiting for them on the porch, tablecloth pulled tightly around his head and shoulders and hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm. He immediately goes into triage mode, and the ease with which he slips from anxious worry to clinical detachment would depress her if she wasn't _so fucking cold_.

Mikey refuses to set her down anywhere but directly in front of the fire, and after Donnie's quick one over ("Count backwards from fifty in increments of seven. Hold out your wrist so I can check your pulse. Squeeze my fingers. Harder. _Harder_. Wiggle your feet. I'm going to pull off your boots now. Can you move your toes? Can you feel it when I pinch you here? What about here?") he starts to help her peel out of the rest of her wet layers.

"Sorry," he says once she's down to just her thermals and undershirt. "Doctor's orders. Gotta get completely dry." He turns his head and holds a thick blanket up to give her privacy as she struggles with the clasp of her sweat-soaked bra, then wraps her up burrito style and expertly puts her wet hair up in a towel. It should feel weird, but it doesn't. Maybe it's just the adrenaline crash finally catching up to her. April is too tired to feel anything _but_ tired.

At least she's not the only one getting the naked treatment, though Casey's debriefing is slightly hindered by the fact that he's still clinging tightly to an armload of wood.

"G-got l-l-l-lost," he chatters, wincing as Donnie pries open his fingers and eases the kindling from his grip. "S-s-s-s-saw th' s-storm, get-t-ting wors-se, 'ought I could g-get one m-more l-l-l-l-load. Wind ch-changed direct-t-tion, got t-t-t-turned ar-r-round..."

"Disorientation is also common in the early stages of hypothermia," Donnie says, his flat "medic" voice faintly edged with guilt. "We shouldn't have let you go out in that before we knew exactly how bad the storm was."

"N-n-n-n-no, sh-sh- _shit,_ Sh-sherlock. B-b-but hey—" Casey grins at them weakly. Thin lines of blood ooze down the cracks in his chapped lips. "—'least I know what n-not to do n-n- _next_ time we need wood-d-d for th' f-fire."

Donnie's mouth thins. Mikey ducks his head, mumbles something about tea, and vanishes into the kitchen. Raph can't seem to stop staring at the raw, peeling flesh of Casey's fingers. His eyes are round, round, and the snow melting off of his dark, heavily scarred skin makes the green glisten like worn marble.

"Nobody's going back out there," he rasps. "We'll burn the furniture if we have to."

April wants to make a joke( _Hey now, the plaid isn't_ that _bad..._ ) but her voice feels frozen in her throat. The wind howls hungrily down the chimney, and the fire, as if sensing danger, shudders low in its grate.


End file.
